"Antifreeze?" I asked, puzzled.
"Should help keep the fluid... well, fluid. You freeze up in the cold. I can see you struggling to move sometimes after you been out a while. Hopefully this'll help."
I nodded, thankful that the man had put so much thought into my problems.
Using a sharp hunting knife, Ellison cut a small incision deep into the creature’s left wrist. He inserted a large, thick needle of bright surgical steel into the artery of the other arm. The needle was connected by rubber tubing to the warm canister of embalming fluid. He flicked a switch and the fluid began to pump out of the vat, darkening the surgical tube as it slowly oozed toward the body.
I supressed a cough as the fluid visibly began to enter the artery and a more obvious gag came to my throat as I saw dark, almost black, congealed blood begin to flow from the body’s other arm, which hung off the table and drained with sickening splats into a tin bucket.
The process took many long minutes, but I refused to look away, refused to show weakness. The creature squirmed and struggled throughout the process, gargling slightly in its newly thawed throat. A chemical stench filled the air, mingling with the stale smell of decay and raw meat. I held my breath and realized with renewed surprise that there was no need for me to breathe at all. I could spend all day without a single breath if I wanted. To take my mind off the stench and the whole horrid process, I decided to play a game with myself. I began to count how long I could go without feeling the imagined need for oxygen. Eventually, I lost count as the seconds ticked away. It was strange not to feel my lungs burn; not to hear my brain roar at me to inhale.
At last, after what felt like ages; a painfully long period of time, the embalming fluid had nearly been used up and the fluid exiting the creature’s wrist had become mostly pink. Ellison shut off the pump and removed the needle, sterilizing it in a boiling pot of water. He stitched the small incision tightly and bound it in tape.
“The next part might be hard to watch,” he muttered.
My lip curled in disgust. “And what would you call that last part?” I replied raggedly.
Ellison made a careful cut into the thing’s abdomen. There was a gurgle as built up gas released through the incision. He moved with surprising gentleness. My head swam. I blinked repeatedly, working hard to remain upright as he carefully pulled organs from the creature’s body. How many times had I dressed a kill in the field? I certainly hadn’t been squeamish like this since the early days of my hunting career. Once or twice my father had taken me with him. By this time, I’d long since learned to show no signs of weakness around him and by sheer force of will, I refused to let the blood and guts affect me.
This thing was meat and bone just like a deer, a duck or a fish. Despite my admonitions against myself, my head continued to spin. I fixed my gaze on its face. It showed no awareness of the torturous acts that were being inflicted upon its body. It snarled and gazed blindly, entirely unchanged. I clenched my teeth together hard, forcing myself to watch, to get through it.
“So far so good,” Ellison muttered as he carefully stitched up the abdomen with tough, treated sinew. “The organs haven’t gone too bad yet. Lucky we had this cold snap.” I nodded, unable to speak for fear of the bile that had risen to my throat. “The blood’s all drained and it hasn’t shown any pain or change in function. I was worried that the embalming fluid might be toxic or that it’d need proper blood still but obviously not. I took out the guts, but left the heart and lungs. You still seem to use your lungs, even if you don’t have to. Besides, I figure you’ll need ‘em to talk. If you can’t draw air people’ll figure you out pretty quick. Didn’t want to take the heart out ‘cause the fluid’d leak into the chest. I closed up everything else as best I could.”
I nodded vaguely and sat on a dusty wooden chair feeling detached and shell shocked. How was this happening? What had happened to the world that had caused this fuel for nightmares to enter the realm of possibility; the domain of the waking world?
“That’ll do for the insides. Time to try tanning the skin,” he continued, either failing to notice my dismay or, more likely, politely ignoring it. “Might not work as well as skinning the thing, but anything we can do to toughen it up and keep it from rotting should do the trick."
We refilled the tin trough with lime and water and soaked the creature again.
“We’ll leave it for a few more hours,” Ellison said, replacing the board atop the tub and securing it. The thing bumped and splashed around, gurgling. “Gets rid of the hair,” he explained in his brief, rough manner. “Makes the leather soft.”
I breathed in and sighed.
“Rest up,” Ellison said, slapping my shoulder once. With that, he left the shed, following his own advice. I followed but as he walked up the steps to the cabin, I turned and silently stood in the grove, relishing the silence and taking deep breaths of the fresh, cold air. I watched the weeping willow tree as it swayed in the breeze, it’s brittle, cold branches scratching lightly against each other.
“Is this right?” I asked Maggie Ellison’s spirit softly. “Is this what you would want?” I imagined the rosy-cheeked woman from the picture standing beside her tree. On the other side I could almost see Megan standing quietly. Their faces were expressionless and unmoving. I could not read their thoughts through the dispassionate, glassy eyes that stared at me. Eyes that haunted me.
Hours later, Ellison returned from within the house, nodding for me to follow as he re-entered the shed.
We rinsed the body again and he carefully began scraping at the creature's skin with a long, straight knife. Already, most if it's ragged hair had been removed by the lime solution. The scraping of the dull knife pulled the rest of the loosened hair out, taking the follicle with it, smoothing the skin and leaving no insecurities. It now looked truly naked and horribly pitiable. I felt another urge to call the whole thing off, to douse the thing in gasoline and set it free in ash and flame. Instead, I took the knife and relieved Ellison, carrying on where he'd left off, my knife scraping carefully up and down the pale skin.
Ellison allowed the tub of warm water to drain and began to refill it with more salt, clean water, bags of some dark brown grain, and a variety of other dark fluids until the water became turbid and foul. I helped him lower the poor creature in the mixture.
“What the hell is that stuff?” I asked as he stirred the sludge. It was clearly potent, though it bothered me little. Ellison’s face became red and his eyes ran as the mixture bubbled. It was the only time he’d shown any reaction at all to the process.
“Water, salt, bran, bark, battery acid…” he listed without looking up.
“Battery acid? Won’t that… burn?”
“It might,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Like I said, never tried it on something that wasn’t long dead. In the traditional sense, I mean.”
“And bran? Like raisin bran?”
“No raisins.” There was no detectable humour in his voice but I was beginning to think that beneath his dry façade, the man did possess a dark sense of comedy.
I sat down and put my head in my hands. The room swam and spun. I felt overcome. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to relax.
“There,” Ellison said, nodding toward a dark plastic bag that he’d filled with the creature’s dissected organs. “Why don’t you get rid of that. It’ll take some time for the body to soak.”
I nodded vacantly and left the shack, finding a spade and moving robotically out of the ring of trees, far from any of the farm buildings. I felt drained and empty.
Ellison seemed to know or guess what I needed better than I did. It had all been too much but I was too big to admit it. Ellison had seen me becoming overwhelmed, had seen the glassy stare in my eye. I felt weak and ashamed. The old man was doing this sickening job for me and I couldn’t even see it through.
He got rid of you, said my father, Got rid of you ‘cause you’re pathetic. You’re in the way. Nobody wants you around.
&n
bsp; It took a long time to dig a hole deep enough into the frozen soil to bury the contaminated organs. I could have burned them, perhaps I should have burned them, but something in me wanted to give some part of the creature a burial. I don’t know why it mattered to me; I’d never much cared for such things before. I’d found burials and graveyards wasteful and unnecessary, using up money, resources and land, and had never wanted that for myself.
The work and the fresh air were therapeutic. The difficulty of hacking into the frozen ground seemed like payment for the creature’s body. Burning would be easy and the rest of the body would have to be cremated. The labour felt like another small part of the penance I had to pay.
I fell into a rhythmic trance, happy to turn off my mind and allow the rise and fall, the crunch and hush of the shovel to distract me. There was no room in my mind for the voices that haunted me. No room for Megan’s face. No room for the half rotten face of the man that soaked in the tanning solution. I dug and dug, picking my way an inch at a time into the solid earth. At last the hole seemed deep enough to contain the putrid, diseased flesh. I placed the garbage bag into the frozen ground with reverence that surprised me.
I don't know who you were or what you did in life, I thought silently, but I'm sorry this happened to you. Thank you for what you are doing for me. I had little fluid left with which to produce tears and for some reason this troubled me terribly. I wanted to cry over these anonymous body parts. Wanted to water the soil with my own frustrated tears but the act was beyond me. I knelt and hung my head. No tears came. The dead could not mourn the dead.
I shovelled the dirt back in, careful to pack it hard. When I'd finished, I returned to the shed to see that Ellison had once again strapped the plywood cover on top of the trough. The body inside could be heard sloshing mildly, beginning to go dormant having been deprived of light, smell and sound.
“You did good, son,” he muttered to me. The small sign of approval bolstered my waning strength. “You did good.”
Thirty
The tanningprocess took two weeks. Two weeks of foul smelling chemicals, of soaking and drying, of moving and securing the horrible body which never ceased to squirm. We tanned him and then smoothed and softened the skin with paddles and then tanned him again. We hung him to dry, tying his limbs to stretch him out as much as possible. We smoked him in Ellison’s smokehouse to toughen the skin and give it water resistance. I looked on in pity. Though I guessed that Ellison felt sympathy, he kept it to himself, his carven face etched in a mask of fortitude.
I began to become impatient. Watching the days go by had become a sort of psychological torture for me. I watched all the uncomfortable and unpleasant things we did to the creature. The hours upon hours that it spent tied up, or soaking in the bath with a plywood sheet on top, or being prodded and scraped and beaten all reminded me of the ordeal that I would soon face. I wanted it all over with.
Ellison patiently explained again that tanning a hide was usually a process of a month or more. He wanted to make things go as quickly as possible, but noted pointedly that he could not rush the process more than a little. This was not skin to be used for gloves or boots, but skin I would wear for however long I continued to walk the earth. It had to last. In the end, Ellison seemed to be pleased with the progress as he checked in day after day, nodding to himself as he progressed to each new stage of the process.
The creature never seemed to be aware of the horrid things we did to it, never seemed aware of anything except it’s own unquenchable hunger. When I was near, it remained dormant. When Ellison was doing his work, the thing squirmed and bit air, its white eyes fixed unblinking on the uninfected man. When Ellison was near, the creature was tireless. It would continue to squirm and bite and hiss for hours. No matter how fruitless its efforts proved, no matter how long it struggled against unyielding bonds, no matter how it rubbed its own skin raw, it would continue to thrash.
Throughout the process I felt the knot tighten in the pit of my stomach. I felt the terrible tightness around my eyes. Eyes that wanted to cry in anger, frustration and self-pity, but could not. Soon it would be me being soaked in tannins and salts. Soon it would be my skin smoked and drying. Soon it would be my guts buried unmarked in a field.
As the transformation took place in our test subject, I tried my best to keep my mind and body occupied. I continued to read much of Ellison’s library and helped to work the farm. I took particular relish in reading Maggie’s religious books. There was a sick satisfaction that came from reading passages about the end-times and the plagues and disasters that would be visited on the earth. Of course, few predictions of the prophets matched with what had happened, but it was interesting all the same.
At last Ellison pronounced that we were finished. The dead man had been preserved. His treated skin and poison filled veins held up well to the elements, so far as we could tell.
I had to admit the results were encouraging. The man looked odd with his dark, toughened skin, which he wore loosely; nearly as wrinkled and worn now as Ellison’s, and yet he also looked a little less… dead. Less rotten, less frozen and corpse-like. He looked instead like an aged man who had worked the long days of his life in a sun-baked field. The anti-freeze in particular had been one of Ellison’s more inspired ideas. The thing was noticeably less hampered by cold.
“It’s time,” Ellison stated unceremoniously. It was time, I knew, for two things. The second of these would be my own transformation. I nodded in reply. I could not find my voice. “We release him first,” Ellison said with quiet deference, echoing my own thoughts.
I nodded again. I realized suddenly that this man, with his few words, was a truer father than I’d ever known. Somehow he had come to know me better than anyone else had, better than my mother with her clinical denial, better than my father with his bitter judgements. I, too, had come to know him, had come to learn from him through his silence. It was the silence that we understood best. We spoke the same inarticulate language and shared the same tacit thoughts. It was comforting. I knew I was putting my body in good hands.
We constructed a small pyre of aged wood and dry straw. We secured the frail-looking man to the pyre and watched without pity as he struggled against his bonds. He did not understand, but in my heart I knew that we were relieving him of an afterlife full of horror, torment and rot. It snarled and thrashed as Ellison approached him carrying a small jerry can of gas. I did not have to ask. Somehow Ellison knew what I wanted and needed. He handed me the fuel and stood back. I poured it carefully over the creature and the woodpile. I hoped it would be quick. After all we’d put it through it deserved a quick end. I wondered again if, somewhere in there, suppressed beneath the deranged and tormented depths of disease and death, the man’s thoughts, feelings and awareness still remained. Behind those demon eyes and animal snarls was there a person still, trapped and horrified?
“Thank you,” I whispered, kneeling beside him, my lips close to its ear. The thing did not acknowledge me. Its nostrils flared toward Ellison. “Thank you for everything. It will be quick. Won’t suffer no more.” It showed no sign of understanding.
Ellison stepped forward. He had set a roll of newspaper alight and handed it to me with the reverence due a sacred object. As the edges of the newspaper blackened and curled, I watched as the black and white picture of a young, smiling man decayed and turn to ash. The man’s eyes crumpled in the flame as I gazed transfixed for just a moment. I wondered who the man in the newspaper had been. I wondered what had happened to him.
I took the newspaper and placed it carefully beneath the creature’s head, keeping my hand far back as the gasoline ignited in a rush. I spread the fire to as much of the body as I could until the newspaper crumbled and the flame came too close to my hand. I dropped the last bit of crumpled paper atop his leather chest and stepped back, watching the flame rise higher into the air.
It became impossible to make out the body’s features but I allowed myself to imagine for a moment that
in its distorted face I saw an expression of relief. The fire burned long and the smoke rose high. I stood watch until only flickering embers remained. The creature had earned that much. Had earned my respect and company while it burned away to soot. I thought of Megan as the smoke rose into the sky.
Fire. The only cure. The only immunity. One day I, too, would be released by it but not now. Not yet. There was work to be done.
“Are you ready?” Ellison asked that night after the embers of the pyre had grown cold.
“No,” I replied truthfully. He nodded knowingly but said nothing.
“I should have returned this to you sooner,” Ellison said in a low apologetic voice. He held something in his thick, calloused hands. “Slipped my mind to be honest. Perhaps it’ll help you get through what comes next.” He pressed the cold object into my hand. It was Megan’s phone. Still charged. Once more I wished a tear would come to my eye.
“Thank you,” I choked. Ellison nodded and looked away. He seemed to know the significance of the gift he’d given.
“I have a speaker. Don’t use it much anymore. Maggie liked musicals. We’ll hook it up and you can listen while we work.”
I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to speak again.
I recall being naked and cold, laid out upon the same scarred workbench, now stained with dried fluid from our previous experiment. I’d been soaked in the purifying salt bath until my skin felt loose and my limbs were no longer tight. I was tied down and secured, unable to move in case something went wrong and my awareness slipped away and left me as one of them. In case through panic or pain I bit, scratched or clawed at Ellison as the previous creature had. In case I struggled or pulled away from the knife or the surgical tube.
Ellison took a deep breath that reverberated in his barrel chest like distant thunder. “You ready?” he rumbled. I nodded and closed my eyes, trying to relax.
The Penance of Leather (Book 1): Ain't No Grave Page 24
